Guild Wars 2 Interview
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You have mentioned that dungeons will be playable once you have completed the personal story version of the dungeon and that they will have several branches and paths. How exactly is this going to work?
There's not really a personal story versions of the dungeon. The Dungeon has as story version but it's not really your story it's the story of a group of characters that are important characters In Guild Wars that you encounter in the world during the personal story. However the dungeons are more their story.
What happens is once you finish the story part of the dungeon, there's an explorable mode you can go into. Each dungeon is very different so there's no standard way that the branching works. One of our philosophies is we don't want to fall into patterns too much as it can make the content feel very predictable.
So it's not the case you finish the dungeon and the explorable mode has three paths because this is not always the case. Sometimes this is true but sometimes there's one path and then it will branch and then branch again. Sometimes there are different ways to accomplish the same thing and it varies from dungeon to dungeon.
One example is, there's particular lab that you demolish and you have to beat the main antagonist in story mode but you go back into the dungeon in exploreable mode and clean up the aftermath, the mess you made. First time you went in and took out the Commander but you didn't take care of the entire lab and you have to go back. What happens is you get teleported down and get a number of options on how to deal with going through the dungeon again. That's one example of the way the branching works but it will work very differently depending on the dungeon you are in.
And a snip from part two:
We have already seen that skills of your team mates can affect each other. When there are many people playing together or against each other in PvP and PvE, is there an easy to way tell if ground effects are for your team or against? How can players tell the difference?
The whole system for this has just gone in, what it does is, we take certain skills and we look at whether it's a skill that people actually. For example Fireball, you throw it out and it lands and explodes, but it doesn't need to show you what it does because its already exploded, you don't have a choice. We take a look at what skills it does matter with. You mentioned the Firewall and the Meteor Shower, so what we did was create rings and boxes that go on the ground or around the skills.
If you are on my team and I cast a Firewall, you will see a white ring around it that shows that '˜yes this is a friendly'. If it's an enemy one you will see a red box around it. Then we also do things with skills like Healing Rain . Enemies see Healing rain as white so white generally means it doesn't affect me either way and the allies see healing rain as a blue ring around it indicating there's positive benefits to going into it.
